Ahead of Their Time: Louis Bombardier (1742-1789)

Narrator: Today we take for granted that energy and matter are related, but for a long time everyone thought they were different. It took the dedicated efforts of the eighteenth century French chemist and tax collector, Louis Bombardier, to set humanity on the course to enlightenment. (Baroque harpsichord music. An 18th century dining room. Bombardier has a meal with his contemporaries.) Woman: Monsieur, what is it you are eating again? For your first course, you had a milkshake, then you had a frozen yogurt on a stick, and now you dine on a milk chocolate bunny. What will you eat next I wonder? Cheese? (Derisive laughter.) Bombardier: Madame, if you must know, I have eaten nothing but milk since my last drinking engagement with the Marquis. I think that milk may hold the key to understanding the universe and I would like to invite all of you to a demonstration which I hope will prove it. (Later that evening in Bombardier's basement, the guests stand around Bombardier as he explains to workings of the strange apparatus on his table.) Bombardier: Now you see what happens when we evaporate the milk. It goes into this tube where it is cooled and condenses and falls as droplets back into this can. These cans of condensed milk take much longer to spoil than normal milk. Leduc: Mon Dieu! You mean you have found a way to kill all the babbittes! Bombardier: Babbittes? Leduc: Yes, the tiny wee creatures that live inside the milk and make it go bad! Monsieur, this contraption is worth a fortune! Bombardier: That was not the goal of my experiment! It was to show that the mass of the condensed milk is the same as the mass that was lost by the unevaporated milk! Leduc: Now you're raving. Bombardier: You don't believe me, Monsieur? I bring you all the way into my basement and turn milk into gas and gas back into milk in front of your eyes and you do not believe me? Then I must challenge you to a duel. (Exit all but Leduc and Bombardier.) Stand right there and don't move. I shall take ten paces from you to give you a fighting chance. (He walks out of range, turns and shoots. His first shot shatters his invention.) Best two out of three! Narrator: Unfortunately for Bombardier, his background as a tax collector did not endear him to the people when the revolution came. (A Kangaroo Court. Bombardier stands before the judge and jury in bonds.) Judge: Have you any last words to say in your defense? Bombardier: Only that I will go to my grave believing that the mass of milk is constant. If you trap all the milk vapors in a tube, they will weigh the same as the lost weight of the milk out of which they were boiled. Judge: Ah yes. Your famous theory. And if you trap all the citizens inside the city with a wall as you did, the weight of the taxes they are forced to pay is the same as the weight of Louis' crown jewels! But the people have another theory. They believe that the lost weight of your headless body can be accounted for by the weight of your head! Take him away! (They rush him away to his execution. At the last minute he pulls out a note and thrusts it into the hand of his assistant. Exit Bombardier with escort.) Judge: Well? What does it say? Assistant: It will make no sense to you if you are not a man of science. Judge: Tell us anyway. Assistant: Energy equals milk times the speed of light. Narrator: While Bombardier was slightly off in his vision, he was more on track than anyone else back then. Today French paratroopers honour his name by crying it out as they jump on their targets. He is not to be confused with the noted French scientist and tax collector Antoine Lavoisier, who shared a roughly parallel life experience in the same period.
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© 2007, 2013. Scripts by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved.